“Myth of Delusion” Get’s Noticed By American Intelligence

How Qaeda Warned Its Operatives on Using Cell Phones
WASHINGTON —
By ELI LAKE – Staff Reporter of the Sun
October 18, 2006
When an aspiring Al Qaeda terrorist is buying a cell phone, it’s best that he purchase the chip inside the device under a phony name or from a black market vendor that does not sell the accompanying documentation. If he has any reason to believe his phone has been tapped, he should sell it immediately to a stranger.
This is the kind of advice contained in “Myth of Delusion,” a 151-page manuscript making the rounds on password-protected jihadi Web sites. The book recently caught the attention of American intelligence analysts, who estimate that it was released sometime this summer.
An English translation obtained by The New York Sun and whose authenticity was confirmed by a senior intelligence official gives an insight into what America’s Islamist enemies believe they know about the CIA and the National Security Agency. It also underscores the paranoid mind at the heart of the international jihad movement, devoting paragraphs to how South Korean intelligence influences America’s national security through a newspaper controlled by the Unification Church, the Washington Times.
The author of the book is a little-known terrorist named Mohammed al-Hakaymah, a member of a violent group that recently splintered off from an Egyptian Islamist organization, Gama’a al-Islamiyya, when it signed a cease-fire agreement with Cairo. Mr. Hakaymah gained some notoriety on August 5, when Osama bin Laden’s Egyptian-born deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, mentioned his name in an announcement that Al Qaeda was merging with the splinter group.
An independent analyst affiliated with the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, Chris Zambelis, said yesterday that the book is similar to a military manual published by a Syrian named Abu Musab al-Suri, which was based largely on open sources and information released by the Pentagon.

“You see this kind of thing a lot. On the radical Islamic forums, you have people put up U.S.military manuals advising followers about American military tactics. In terms of an actual manual for intelligence, though, this is the most extensive and comprehensive I have seen,” Mr. Zambelis said.

The book also gives a detailed description of how the CIA recruits spies, based on information widely available in fiction and nonfiction books about espionage. But in this section, the author conflates the training of spies and officers, writing that recruited spies are trained in the West Virginia CIA facility known as the Farm, when in fact only officers receive training there.
Yesterday, the senior intelligence official summed up the book as:

“an assessment of American intelligence, a mixture of a couple of things. There is some element of training from things they gather from open sources. … But this is also clearly propaganda.”

The propaganda element appears to be aimed at certain Islamists who have rejected Al Qaeda’s view that America, or what the group’s leaders call “the far enemy,” is too powerful and too efficient to challenge.
One of the purposes of the book is to show that America’s intelligence agencies “make mistakes and are not infallible,” a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, Mary Habeck, said. The author is saying:

“We don’t have to fear them like we always fear them. That is why it is called the ‘Myth of Delusion.’ One of bin Laden’s purposes, he says, in authorizing 9/11 was to break the media blockade, to show the invincibility of the United States as a media myth,” Ms. Habeck added.

In his preface, Mr. Hakaymah writes that the book will “use the published reports, news, and research, which expose the extent of the failure of the American intelligence services inside and outside the United States.”

He writes that the November 2001 killing of a CIA officer, Michael Spann, in Afghanistan represented an enormous victory for Al Qaeda because the agency had to admit his death publicly.

Wild Thing’s comment……
I am glad our intelligence is on top of this. I found it interesting how desperate the Islamists are for information to turn it into propaganda for their use.